Earth Day & the Unicorn

Do you associate Earth Day with Ira Einhorn, the Unicorn? Well, don’t!

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Unicorns

From the German, the surname Einhorn could be translated “one horn”. Perhaps this was among the reasons that Ira Einhorn, America’s consummate hippie on the 1970s, liked to call himself the Unicorn. Unicorns possessed mystical qualities that must have appealed to Ira as well. A touch of its horn could heal the sick and purify water. It was irresistibly drawn to virgins, who were used as bait during medieval unicorn hunts.

Leonardo DaVinci wrote in his notebooks:

The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear, it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it.

Because of its affinity for virgins, medieval Christian iconography frequently showed a unicorn with the Virgin Mother. It came to represent the annunciation, and even Jesus Himself.

However, the legend has a dark side, too. Only a virgin can entrap this virtuous beast, and only through betrayal.

Marco Polo saw unicorns quite differently. They were, he wrote:

…scarcely smaller than elephants. They have the hair of a buffalo and feet like an elephant’s. They have a single large black horn in the middle of the forehead… They have a head like a wild boar’s… They spend their time by preference wallowing in mud and slime. They are very ugly brutes to look at. They are not at all such as we describe them when we relate that they let themselves be captured by virgins, but clean contrary to our notions.

Polo seems to be describing the Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) which were common south central Asia in his day, though now they are rare and endangered. A mostly nocturnal animal, they were seen by day most often through the shifting morning mists of their wetland habitat. Generally peaceful, a male was prone to deadly violence when another male challenged his choice of mate.

Two very different kinds of unicorn, both embodied by Ira Einhorn: the counterculture peacenik with aspiration to the mystical, who liked to call himself the Unicorn; and the angry lover and venal beast who, spurned by his girlfriend, became the Unicorn Killer.

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The Unicorn Killer

Born into a middle-class Pennsylvania family, Einhorn studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he became involved in the anti-war and nascent ecological movements. Bearded, charismatic, and iconoclastic, Ira rose to prominence as Philadelphia’s #1 Hippie. He advocated free love, peace and flower power. On the first Earth Day in 1970, he became a sort of master of ceremonies for the live broadcast of outdoor events scheduled in Philadelphia. It was a role that suited him well, appealing to his broad narcissistic streak. He later claimed that Earth Day was his idea, and that he had been instrumental in organizing events across the country. Other organizers challenge his account, and in fact, there is no record of his having done any organizing.

Helen ‘Holly’ Maddux, flower child, was a stunning blonde from Tyler, Texas, attending Bryn Mawr College near Philly when she was drawn into the powerful vortex of the Unicorn. During the years they lived together, though, Holly discovered that Ira had a dark side, jealous and verbally (at least) abusive. After five years, she had had enough. She moved to New York, and became involved with another man. Incensed, Einhorn threatened to throw her remaining belongings into the street if she did not come personally to collect them. Against the advice of friends and family, she returned to Philadelphia to retrieve her things. She was never seen alive again.

Meanwhile, Einhorn was cultivating new contacts among the local politicians and corporate bigwigs. Philadelphia’s upper crust invited him to elite parties; businesses hired him as their consultant for marketing to a counterculture growing ever more affluent. On graduating from Penn, he had become a professional hippie, and was turning it into a lucrative career—a con man for the Age of Aquarius. Yes, he told the police when they asked after Holly, she had been to the apartment, but she had gone to the co-op for tofu and sprouts, and never returned.

A year after Holly’s disappearance, neighbors noticed a nasty smell emanating from Einhorn’s apartment. This annoyed but did not surprise, for his personal hygiene and housekeeping were both suspect, consistent with his status as a grown-up flower child. Then the downstairs neighbors complained of a foul, reddish-brown liquid dripping into their apartment from Einhorn’s apartment, directly above.

When police responded, a nude Einhorn met them at the door. He offered no resistance as they searched his apartment. In his bedroom closet, they found a steamer trunk that contained shards of Styrofoam, crumpled newspaper, piles of air fresheners, and the decomposed remains of a woman, her skull smashed by multiple blows with a heavy object.

“Looks like we found Holly Maddox,” said the officer to the Unicorn. “You found what you found,” was Ira’s sardonic reply.

At his arraignment he was represented by Arlen Specter, who would soon begin a 30-year career in the U.S. Senate, represented Ira. Arguing that his client was a nice Jewish boy from a good family who posed no peril to the public or risk of flight, Arlen got his bail reduced to $40,000. The $4000 bond was paid by one of his wealthy society patrons. He immediately fled to Europe and remained on the lam for 20 years. He had already been arraigned, though, and his trial went forward. In 1993, he was convicted in absentia of the murder of Holly Maddux. He got life in prison with no possibility of parole.

When he was finally located in France, extradition was difficult. France had abolished the death penalty, and the treaty provided that they need not return a prisoner to a country that might execute him. In 1972, the U.S Supreme court had suspended capital punishment until each state’s procedure could be reviewed and found to comply with the 8th amendment proscription of cruel and unusual punishment (Furman v. Georgia 408 US 238-1972). In 1977, when the murder had occurred, Pennsylvania had not undergone that review; hence, Einhorn could not be executed then, and could not be now. After four more years of haggling, France was compelled to return him to Philadelphia to stand trial.

At a new trial, the Unicorn’s defense was (pardon the pun) outside the box. His power and righteousness had been so great back then, and his knowledge of secret government mind-control projects so damning, that unidentified enemies (the CIA or the KGB?), in a nefarious plot to neutralize him, had murdered Holly and planted her body in his apartment as a frame. In self-defense, and out of respect for her vegan beliefs, he had decided to compost her in his closet.

Had he produced reasonable doubt? Hardly. A jury took just two hours of deliberation to convict him of first degree murder. He is serving life without parole.

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Earth Day

Earth Day, by the way, was the idea of Gaylord Nelson, A Democrat who served as governor and senator for the great state of Wisconsin, and steadfastly refused credit for this signal achievement, preferring to believe that it just growed, like Topsy. Still, his conservation chops put him in a league with Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and John Muir. In 1946, he married Carrie Lee Dotson, a nurse he had met during his military service; both she and the marriage were going strong when he died at 89 of heart failure. He had no use for colorful nicknames or boastful claims. He just rolled up his sleeves (he was equally at home in denim and linen) and went to work. He was the real deal.

As governor, Nelson’s overhaul of the state’s natural resource program brought him national recognition as the “conservation governor.” He took a chaotic bureaucracy and transformed it into a single Department of Resource Development. He established the Youth Conservation Corps that created green jobs for over 1,000 unemployed young people in the state. He fought to earmark $50 million for the Outdoor Recreation Action Program (ORAP) to acquire land for public parks and wilderness areas. The extreme popularity of his achievements in conservation paved Nelson’s road to the U.S. Senate in 1962.

In 1969, having seen the empowerment derived from campus activism in the 1960s, Nelson proposed a day when citizens across the country would host events, preferably outdoors, to raise awareness of environmental problems, and encourage grass-roots political involvement. April, a season of rebirth and hope, seemed the perfect time.

Judy Moody and Denis Hayes, staffers in the office of US Senator Gaylord Nelson, begin planning for the Environmental Teach-In, which became the first Earth Day

His proposal brought immediate, overwhelming support. National media widely broadcast the plans for this so-called “Earth Day” and enthusiastic letters flooded into Nelson’s office. Engaged crowds turned out for planned events from coast to coast, including the one in Philly with the sleazy MC who wanted us to believe he dreamed the whole thing up. He did not. He was a charlatan, and ultimately a killer, who scammed a nation and then ran away

Nelson created a small national office to offer support to the thousands of grassroots efforts that sprung up everywhere, but he firmly rejected any top-down organization. “Earth Day planned itself,” he later reflected, and in fact, it did, with just a nudge from Nelson. An estimated 20 million Americans, young and old, gathered on April 22, 1970 to confront the ecological troubles in their cities, states, nation, and planet—and to demand action from themselves and from their elected officials.

Today, with so many of the environmental protections in peril from short-sighted attacks on regulation in any form, and greedy corporate interests that see that valuable natural resources now in public trust may soon become vulnerable to seizure by plutocrats for private gain.

This Earth Day, help the unicorns’ magical horns clean the water and heal the sick planet. Let it doze not in the lap of a chaste maiden who will betray it, but in the mighty arms of mother Gaia, whom we can trust. Let us gather behind them like a conquering horde, and advance together to make the Earth a better place tomorrow than it was yesterday.

When my kids were young and still filled with wonder, their school held an annual “Science Fair” for the upper elementary grades. Science was not a strong suit at that school. The organizers of the fair had no sense of the difference between science and technology, and the thing soon devolved into show in which the pupils brought “inventions”, sometimes only imagined though there were some working prototypes from the more ambitious kids. The projects were displayed on folding tables in the gym. The young inventors stood by their projects while a jury of stern teachers with clipboards passed among them, rating their work. The winning students earned the pride of achievement, I guess, but no shred of the joy of discovery of new knowledge, which is what drives scientific discovery, was present in that room.

The event occurred each May in the evening. The children stood by their project tables, more or less at attention, to answer the occasional question from barely engaged parents who wandered by, as logy as cluster flies in October. Once the jury came and his project was evaluated, each pupil was dismissed. At that point most of them, uninterested in the other “science” projects, usually retired into the twilight of the playground just outside. From there the music of the children’s laughter barely penetrated to the solemn ceremony inside. They skipped after frogs the the swale that girdled the field like a moat. They chased butterflies among the milkweed until the sky reddened in the west, and then chased fireflies through the thickening dusk.

The great irony was, of course, that the science did not begin for these children until they were dismissed from the Science Fair. What was happening outside, what made the laughter, was pure, self-motivated discovery. A child’s mind, left to its own devices, boils with the curiosity that drives science, relentlessly explores the physical world around it, and swells with joy at each new self-directed discovery. Children lack only the clarity of insight and precision of thought that marks a Galileo or a Maxwell. The ones who keep that childish wonder ablaze within them as their minds mature are the Einsteins yet to come. “There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics,” wrote J. Robert Oppenheimer, “because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.”

Artists respond to the same muse that scientists do. All children are Leonardos. Give a small child a box of crayons or a set of tempera paints and you will get a stream of creativity and confident self-expression that will knock your socks off if you really look at it. As children get older, doubts begin to grow within them, mostly planted there by well-meaning adults. The child is told “This is how you draw a house” and hears instead: You don’t know how to draw a house. Over time this feeling generalizes: I can’t draw. Sure enough, now he can’t. “The chief enemy of creativity,” said Pablo Picasso, “is ‘good’ sense.”

Art and science are not the same thing, of course. In many ways they are polar opposites. Science is analytic: it breaks things down and puts the the pieces back together, like a child with a broken mechanical toy, to gain insight into what makes the universe work. Art is synthetic, putting disparate pieces together, like a child with Legos, to create something new that helps us understand how the universe works. What art and science share, what powers both, is wonder. “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” wrote Einstein, “the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

Wonder is what children do best, and what adults often find hardest to do. “It took me four years to paint like Raphael,” said Picasso. “It has taken me a lifetime to paint like a child.” We need to cherish our children’s ways of thinking, not bend them to our own.

A while back (May 26, 2014) I posted a piece about art, science, and medicine, in which I made a statement that I immediately regretted. It was flippant, specious, and just plain wrong.

I was discussing the relationship of art and science with medicine, comparing them to the relationship of position and velocity with elementary particles, as described by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal. I finished with a parenthetical aside: Alert: This is a metaphor—art not science—but you can see how they get mixed up.

Science, of course, does not eschew metaphor. In fact, it is at least half metaphor itself.

At its root science has two great divisions: taxonomy and synthesis. In the early stages of any field of science, it is necessary to develop a common structure and nomenclature so that the field can be meaningfully thought about and discussed. Taxonomy is all about observation and classification, and the naming of things in the context thus created. Synthesis is all about joining separate parts into a working whole. Once the taxonomists have built the edifice, the synthesizers seek to understand it. The main tool they use is metaphor.

Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer who precisely cataloged the movements of thousands of heavenly bodies, was a master taxonomist but rather a dud at synthesis. His cosmology, which sought to reconcile Ptolemy’s 2nd-century earth-centric system with Copernicus’ new sun-centric idea, never really worked. Copernicus’ radical thinking, however, when combined with Brahe’s vast database, allowed Johannes Kepler to formulate his laws of planetary motion. These, together with Galileo’s observations of falling bodies, among other things, led Isaac Newton to synthesize his laws of gravity and motion. Over the centuries observations and ideas continued to come together, forming veritable skyscrapers of thought, until eventually men left booted footprints on the moon.

Apollo bringing the sun

Since ancient times people have sought to explain phenomena they could not understand by invoking causes they could not see.

Poseidon

Freya

The storms that sank ancient Grecian ships were sent by enraged Poseidon, the testy Greek god of the sea. Lovely Freya sent the pangs of love that so mysteriously stirred the Norseman’s breast when the beautiful Brunhilde passed by, but also fired him up for war from her chariot pulled by two giant cats. In his golden chariot Apollo brought the sun to the Roman world each morning, along with the fires of creativity, healing, prophesy and more. Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, brought life and civilization to the ancient Mesoamerican peoples. Today we no longer believe these explanations; we file them under humanities or arts, not science.

Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent

Art seeks truth through metaphor. The quests of Don Quixote ring as true today as they did four hundred years ago, although they never happened. If you want to know about Victorian London you can read the dry facts in a history book, or you can let Charles Dickens take you there. Which experience is truer? The Mona Lisa will teach you silently, if you listen carefully, about the very nature of mystery itself. Art uses things which are not facts to bring us closer to underlying, unknowable truths.

Scientists who synthesize do not claim to be seeing reality directly, either. Instead they describe it through a metaphor that makes predictions which can be tested. They speak of the “Theory of Evolution” and the “Standard Model” of particle physics, treating these things as if they were real while acknowledging that they are not.

This conundrum haunts the very definition of the word theory, which can mean:

1) a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena, (“Quantum Theory”), or

2) a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural and subject to experimentation or proof, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact (“the prosecution’s theory of the case”), or even

3) a contemplation, speculation, guess or conjecture (“I have a theory about life after death”).

Philosophers have long been skeptical about our ability to perceive the world as it really is. Plato explained this in his Allegory of the Cave, in which he describes prisoners who have lived their lives chained to the wall in a cave in such a way that they can see nothing but the flickering shadows on the wall in front of them. Behind them burns a steady fire. Between the prisoners and the fire is a walkway where puppeteers hold up things that cast the shadows on the wall. The prisoners cannot see themselves or each other directly, and nothing moves in front of them. The shadows comprise the entire world that they perceive.

Then one of them is freed and dragged up into the painful, dazzling sunshine. Eventually his eyes adjust, and he sees the world as it really is. He becomes the enlightened “Philosopher-King”. When he is dragged back down into the cave, he tries to tell the other prisoners what he has seen. He exhorts them to throw off their chains and join him in the light. Thinking him mad, they slay him.

In this metaphor, we are all the prisoners chained to the wall, incapable of seeing the actual world, and the enlightened few who, through the application of pure reason, have become Philosopher-Kings. Reality exists, but only outside the cave, beyond the reach of the common mind.

Rene Descartes

Throughout its herky-jerky evolution, science has claimed to be reality only at its own peril. Aristotle thought he knew all there was to know about falling bodies until Galileo’s experiments proved him wrong. The church knew all about the flat Earth and the crystal globes that twirled around it in a perfect heaven, until a host of mounting observations overwhelmed these ideas. “Cogito, ergo sum,” declaimed Rene Descartes, the great 17th century French polymath: “I think, therefor I am.” We can directly experience the fact of our own existence; all else in conjecture.

“The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote,”wrote Albert A. Morley confidently at the close of the nineteenth century. This is ironic, because Morley, with his partner in science Edward W. Michelson, was then dedicating his professional life to a quixotic quest: demonstrating the reality of the “luminiferous aether”, a mysterious medium which the science of Newton and Maxwell required to carry light waves across the vast vacuum of space. Waves, the thinking went, are a disturbance of a medium: sound waves a disturbance of air, surf a disturbance of water. So light waves were a disturbance of the aether, which pervaded all the universe. The pair were unable to find it.

In 1905 Albert Einstein, inspired by Michelson and Morley’s epic fail, published his first paper on relativity. Also in the air at the turn of the century was Max Plank’s demonstration that energy, like matter, was composed of atom-like elements he called quanta, which behaved in curious ways. These two gigantic ideas, relativity and quantum mechanics, toppled Newton/Maxwell physics and rebuilt it on a new foundation. In the process, the need for Morley’s luminiferous aether completely evaporated. It had never existed after all.

Thinking of science as reality is lazy thinking. Science is a description of something which is probably real, using an unusual kind of metaphor—one that is testable through experiment. The history of gravity is an interesting case in point. Aristotle decreed that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. Galileo timed spheres as they rolled down inclines; he showed that their rates of descent were not dependent on their weights—heavy spheres fall at the same rate as light ones. Newton thought up a metaphor for gravity that showed with mathematical precision that the gravitational attraction between two objects gets larger as their combined masses get larger, and smaller as the distance between them grows, but their rates of acceleration toward each other are always the same. {F =g(m1m2/r2), for the scientists among you.} Through centuries of testing this metaphor has proved accurate, describing with equal grace the falling of an apple from a tree, the arc of a cannonball through space, and the movements of planets around the sun. The Industrial Revolution, from its locomotives and steam-powered leviathins to its host of mechanical devices in homes, farm fields, and factories, even the moon landing itself, were all achieved using Newtonian physics.

When the fiasco of the Michelson-Morley experiment finally made the metaphor of gravitational force obsolete, Einstein’s one-time mentor Hermann Minkowsky thought up the metaphor of spacetime. Einstein took this idea and ran with it, joining it with his own Special Theory of Relativity to synthesize the General Theory of Relativity. This intellectual monument explains gravity with uncanny precision on large scales like the solar system’s, but not so well on subatomic scales, where gravity does not seem to exist at all. In such tiny places another metaphor, called quantum theory, describes infinitesimal particles and actions in terms of waves of probability, but it makes a hash of describing gravity. Relativity and quantum mechanics are both metaphors for the underpinnings of the universe. Both have undergone more than a century of experimental testing and found to be accurate. Yet they are fundamentally incompatible.

Yet another metaphor, called string theory, accurately describes gravity, electromagnetism, and matter from unfathomably cosmic to inconceivably infinitesimal sub-quantum scales. Yet string theory requires leaps of faith into places that are hard for today’s mind, raised on Newton, Einstein, and Planck, to go. For example, spacetime must consist of eleven or more dimensions, rather than the four (height, length, width and time) that we perceive.

Our trouble comprehending it has nothing to do with its accuracy as a metaphor, however. Those dimensions may be easier for future generations to understand and use in their scientific work than we find them to be today. As Max Planck explained a century ago, “A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” That happened with relativity and with quantum theory, and may happen with string theory as well. Or perhaps a better metaphor is waiting in the wings.

I have gone on much longer than I expected to do when I began, and now you are wondering why, when I promised to write about science and art, I seem to dwelling on science alone. What I’m struggling to understand here really is how our minds deal with the flood of our perceptions, and what is out there (whatever ‘out there‘ means) that we should perceive at all. At that quantum level of consciousness, the difference between art and science seems insignificant.

Now the punch-line is likely to be anticlimactic. I mean to make one very simple point: if metaphor is art, and science is metaphor, then science must be art. I really believe this to be true. The mental exertions that produce grand scientific theories are virtually identical in kind to the mental exertions that produce artistic masterpieces. Art and science are two expressions on the same human face, gazing up at the stars or down past his feet, trying to imagine the key metaphor that will make it all make sense.

Homo sapiens (wise man) is actually Homo admiratio (wondering man, or astonished man) Isn’t it admiratio that Latin conflates wonderment with astonishment? I wish we had a word like that.

The artist and the scientist are pursuing the same thing: a metaphor that will bring them closer to the truth that lies behind the flickering shadows on the wall of the cave wherein we all dwell.

Pri-Med 2003: An annual medical conference and trade show in Boston, co-sponsored by Big PhaRMA and the Harvard Medical School.

Many decades ago, on a planet far away, I attended medical school. My professors were learned and serious men. They frequently debated, over stale cafeteria coffee in styrofoam cups, a question which at the time I thought was rather silly. I now realize it represented a struggle for the life or death of the kind of medicine I came to love and try to practice. I fear the wrong side is winning. The question: is medicine a science or an art?

What exactly does this question mean? There is a great deal more subtlety here than first appears. To start, let’s look at the dictionary definitions of the words art and science.

Art (noun): something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings, or the methods and skills used for producing works of art.

Science (noun): the systematic study of the nature and behavior of the material and physical universe, based on observation, experiment, and measurement, and the formulation of laws to describe these facts in general terms.

Sir Luke Fildes– “The Doctor”, 1887

So art is rooted in interior human qualities: imagination, skill, and aesthetics. The doctor I picture is an avuncular man, perhaps a little overweight, on the threshold of old age, in a slightly rumpled three-piece suit. His experience ranges back to ancient lore, but he keeps up-to-date through the medical journals and continuing education symposia at far-flung universities, to which he likes to travel with his wife. He knows everybody in your family, in your whole town even, and everybody respects and trusts him. His diagnostic skills are largely instinctive but unerring, and his therapeutic skills are encyclopedic, including some effective traditional techniques that today’s young bucks were never taught. You may recognize him from several Norman Rockwell paintings in which he has appeared. Of course he makes house calls. He practices the art of medicine.

Science, on the other hand, arises from the universe at large, working back from specific observations to glean the general principles that determine how things work. I see a man in early middle age, clean-shaven and trim, who moves crisply in a long white lab coat, a stethoscope hanging from his neck. He commutes to his office in your town; he doesn’t know anyone there personally, and nobody really knows him, though he is respected for his training and skills. His diagnostic acumen is fact-based, making extensive use of lab and imaging studies to reinforce his clinical impressions. His therapies have been verified in double-blind studies and are regularly updated to be sure they reflect the latest best practices. You’ve seen him in his pharmaceutical ads on TV. There is no point in his making house calls, since his kind of medicine is dependent on the clinical support services that are available at his office or the hospital, but not at your house. His medicine is a science.

Wait a minute. Those definitions don’t really tell the whole story. Sometimes the line between art and science is more uncertain.

Michel Eugène Chevreul (1786 – 1889) was a French chemist whose work with textiles and dyes led him to think scientifically about color and its perception. He published The Laws of Contrast of Colors, and devised the first color wheel. His ideas were taken up by the renowned neoimpressionist Georges Seurat (1859-1891), who expanded on them in an attempt to produce a comprehensive science of painting, which he called chromoluminarism. Seurat used these principles to paint in a style now known as pointillism, which includes his well-known mural Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte. Is this painting the product of art, or science?

Georges Seurat: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte

Then there is Albert Einstein (1875-1955), probably the best known scientist of his day, who famously did most of his experiments entirely in his mind, aided only by blackboard or pencil and paper. These grand mental expeditions, which he called gedankenexperimenten (thought experiments), involved no new observations, measurements, or physical experiments by Einstein himself. Such intense interior work produced beautiful ideas “created with imagination and skill” and “that [express] important ideas.” These are supposed to be the hallmarks of art. Einstein’s ideas became the general theory of relativity, the reality of which has been verified many times over by the real-world experiments of others. Is relativity the product of science, or art?

Years ago, when I was a country doc still wet behind the ears, I cared for an aged widow who lived alone at the end of an narrow dirt road. Her husband had died a few years before, and her only son had not returned from Viet Nam. She was very slowly dying of pulmonary fibrosis, a slow but relentless lung disease that was the result a childhood spent in the textile mills. Her mind was clear, and she had learned how to pace herself. She still managed to prepare her own meals and keep her little cottage tidy. I visited her at home once a week after I’d finished my work in the office. She told me how her symptoms were going while I listened to her heart and lungs. That was the routine that allowed the housecall to proceed without embarrassment to to either of us, though strictly speaking it was not medically necessary; nothing ever changed much.

Then the real purpose of the visit began. She brought iced tea from her refrigerator and we sat in two antimacassared wing chairs in her little sitting room to watch The Price is Right or play Parcheesi, which she had played with her son when he was a boy. We watched the birds at the feeder outside the picture window; she knew the names of every one and could mimic their calls with uncanny fidelity. I spent an hour or so with her each week. In the summer, in her faded housecoat and frayed felt slippers, she would follow me out to my car and wave at me as I drove away, bunching her clothes up in front of her chest with her other hand while a few errant grey hairs blew backwards in the wind. There is no billing code for what I did; I never got a dime for it from Medicare. I think it extended her life a bit, though, and I know she was happier for it. That is the art of medicine.

High Tech: An aerial drone has dropped a defibrillator to help a man stricken on the golf course.

One autumn day she followed me to my car, but before I could get into it she looked suddenly quizzical and made a brief little sound, not unlike the yelp a kitten might make, more startled than pained, when comfortable play gives rise to a painful nip. Then she collapsed, pulseless and unresponsive, onto her threadbare lawn. I was well trained and equipped for this situation. I took the defibrillator from my trunk, ran a strip (v. fib) and defibrillated. She responded to a single shock, and was soon alert again. I slipped an IV into veins like tissue paper and hung the bag of fluid from the mailbox. I gave her a dose of a drug to support her now normal rhythm, and told her to lie still while I went into the house to call the Rescue Squad.

The science of medicine is brisk, efficient, and clear cut, if a little cold. What drives it is success or failure, which can be measured and judged. When metrics are applied this outcome would count as positive, although the widow might not agree.

I remember well what she said as I turned to go: “What the HELL did you do that for?” she yelled after me. It is the only time I ever heard her curse.

I went inside and made the call—the ambulance was rolling. When I got back to her she was lying still. Her eyes were open, but they did not follow me. A few dry leaves had blown up onto the edges of her housecoat where it had spread out carelessly on the struggling grass, in front of the little cottage on the edge of the woods where she had come as a bride; where she had raised a son who, right out of high school, had given his life for his country; where she had held the hand of the husband who had shared her sorrow as he too slipped away from her after fifty years together, for better or for worse. A few minutes ago she had died there peacefully, only to be wrenched back into a world she was weary of by a doctor who was not yet born on her wedding day, and who was only now just beginning to understand the wisdom his patients brought to his practice, which would form the foundation on which he would build his ever changing understanding of the art of medicine.

While I was in her kitchen making the call, she had died again. Her final act had been to pull the IV line from her arm; its life-sustaining fluid was now making a dark, slowly growing stain as it seeped into the parched October soil on which she lay. I made no further effort to revive her.

The art of medicine is rich and warm or cold as ice, and always rife with ambiguities. It is filled with triumph and with pain, which are unsuitable subjects for measurement and analysis.

A contemporary of Einstein’s, Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901 – 1976), noticed, while observing subatomic particles, that if their velocities were measured precisely then their positions appeared indistinct, but if their positions were closely measured, their velocities became fuzzy. Heisenberg posited that this was not because of a shortcoming of the observational technique, but a fundamental property of the universe itself. Heisenberg offered no direct proof for this interpretation of his principle, and expressed the idea only informally and intuitively, though with mathematical precision. Science, or art? Whichever it is, his Uncertainty Principle it is now a key stone in the foundation of modern quantum mechanics.

Perhaps medicine is like this, a fundamental entity having art and science as complementary variables. The harder you look at the art of medicine, the softer the science looks. The closer you examine the science of medicine, the more the art recedes. Uncertainty is a property inherent in the nature of medicine itself. (Alert: This is a metaphor–art, not science–but you can see how they get mixed up.)

For lots of us, technology serves as a proxy for science. Science is an active pursuit, requiring the expenditure of considerable mental effort–something many are reluctant to do. Technology, on the other hand, can be passively received, as Stephen Jobs so ably demonstrated. Today we want the latest technology front and center in our healthcare, like nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography. (Positrons? Really? Isn’t that antimatter? The stuff that fuels the Starship Enterprise? Cool! I want that.) We want our doctors to use “evidence-based” diagnostic and therapeutic tools and techniques. I believe medicine has always striven to do this, but now “evidence” is narrowly defined (by people far smarter than we are) as statistical data derived from large-scale double-blinded crossover studies that have been subjected to peer review. (Except, of course, for the proprietary bits that the pharmaceutical companies sponsoring the research must withhold as industrial secrets to protect their market positions.) A doctor’s personal experience, accumulated over a lifetime of practice, observation and personal growth, no longer counts for much. Such twaddle, unseemly for the distinguished scientists we aspire to become, is left to artists (who, without our fresh enlightenment, don’t know any better).

We patients (reborn now as “consumers”) check the internet to see how our doctors (excuse me, “providers”) measure up against dispassionate “performance-based” scientific metrics applied by our insurance companies, or the looser, more passionate metrics from those “Rate Your Doctor” websites or Angie’s List. While observing our doctors in such an intensely measured, highly analytical, fiercely statistical manner, we look over our shoulders wondering where the old guy with the reassuring bedside manner and old time smarts has gone.

Even as I look elsewhere for my art, I feel behind me the presence of the zombie that is all that remains of that other art I fell in love with in my youth, now lumbering soullessly toward a gray uniform mediocrity foretold by Delphic statisticians in cubicles across this nation, a nation held captive by the data miners and big-number technology that are consuming so much we once held dear, all in the name of political power and commercial gain.

Sally Ride was the first American woman in space. If you are of a certain generation you already know that, and probably have a vague mental image of her mane of dark curly hair, her wholesome good looks and easy-going smile. If you were born after 1983, you probably know even less of her. That is your loss, for this was a very remarkable person, someone who mattered.

Sally and her younger sister Karen, daughters of Presbyterian elders, were born into an environment of leadership and awe. Her sister, sometimes called “Bear”, was drawn to the sacred and became a Presbyterian minister. Sally was drawn to the secular, and became a physicist, astronaut, and role model for children who were drawn to science and adventure. She was a gifted tennis player, too. By her junior year in high school she was ranked eighteenth among girls nationwide, and was encouraged by no less than Billy Jean King to go pro. “I had a change of heart and decided to give [pro] tennis a serious try, and fortunately, that only lasted a couple of months,” she told an interviewer, but in the end science and math won out. “I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis. I went back to school and that was pretty much it.” Her interest for science was manifest early, and throughout junior high and high school she apparently never saw the memo about science being just for boys. “For whatever reason, I didn’t succumb to the stereotype that science wasn’t for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.”“My parents didn’t have a scientific bone in their [bodies] and their daughter was pursuing a career in astrophysics. They didn’t even know what astrophysics meant, but they supported me.” She earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and English, and then a master’s and a doctorate in physics, all from Stanford, studying such arcane subjects as nonlinear optics and the interaction of cosmic x-rays with the interstellar medium.

She joined NASA’s astronaut training program in 1978 with the first “class” that included women. “The astronauts who came in with me in my astronaut class – my class had 29 men and 6 women – those men were all very used to working with women.” Early in her career there she served as capsule communicator (CapCom) for the second and third flights of the space shuttle. She helped develop the robot arm that served the shuttle’s cargo bay, which she would later use in space to launch satellites into orbit. She was a fast learner, and that crash course in aerospace engineering was to serve her well through all of her NASA career. “On a standard space shuttle crew, two of the astronauts have a test pilot background – the commander and the pilot. My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.” She managed experiments and oversaw the mechanical equipment aboard the spacecraft.

On June 18, 1983, the shuttle Challenger blasted into space on STS-7 with mission specialist Sally Ride aboard, the first American woman to orbit. “The most anxious time was during launch, just because that is so dramatic.” “Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it’s not the same – it’s not even close to the same.” Ride was not the first woman in space. Russian Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova had orbited for nearly three days in 1963 aboard the 1-person Vostok-3KA capsule, and Svetlana Savitskaya had spent almost twenty days aboard the Soviet space station Salyut-7 in 1982. Still, the experience of space is unforgettable: “When the space shuttle’s engines cut off, and you’re finally in space, in orbit, weightless… I remember unstrapping from my seat, floating over to the window, and that’s when I got my first view of Earth. Just a spectacular view, and a chance to see our planet as a planet.” Also banal: “The food isn’t too bad. It’s very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program.” What do shuttle astronauts do all day? “Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It’s very busy up on the shuttle.” She was, and still is, the youngest American to have orbited the Earth. The mission went flawlessly, and all work and experiments completed, the reentry was perfect.

Dr. Ride flew on the Challenger again as a Mission Specialist on STS 41-G, which launched from Kennedy Space Center on October 5, 1984. This time the shuttle carried the largest crew to fly so far, including Captain Robert L. Crippen (spacecraft commander, who also commanded STS-7), Captain Jon A. McBride (pilot), fellow Mission Specialists, Dr. Kathryn D. Sullivan and Commander David C. Leestma, as well as two payload specialists, Commander Marc Garneau and Paul Scully-Power. “On both of my flights, everything went very well.” It was in fact another flawless mission. In June 1985, Dr. Ride was assigned to the crew of STS 61-M, but that mission never flew. All shuttle mission training was shut down abruptly in January 1986 when the space shuttle Challenger failed catastrophicallyover the Atlantic 73 seconds after liftoff, killing its crew of seven. Sally Ride never went into space again.

A presidential commission, headed by former secretary of State William P. Rogers, was appointed by Ronald Reagan to investigate the Challenger disaster. Ride was a natural to be appointed to this commission. Not only was she expert in physics and engineering, she was also intimately familiar with the shuttle program in general, and the Challenger in particular. She brought another, equally valuable asset to the Commission as well: “I have a lot of common sense. I know what needs to be done and how to approach it. I have an ability to work with people on large enterprises.” The Rogers Commission found both engineering and procedural defects contributed to the disaster. “After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.” “The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.” In 2008, after the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, Dr. Ride was again enlisted to investigate that disaster.

After NASA, she served as a scientific member of the Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms Control. She became a professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego and a consultant to NASA on several projects, in cooperation with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is the recipient of a huge number of honors and awards for her contributions to science, academia, and space exploration. Her most lasting legacy may be her contribution to making science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers acceptable choices for women as well as men. “If you ask an 11-year-old to draw a scientist, she’s likely to draw a geeky guy with a pocket protector. That’s just not an image an 11-year-old girl aspires to.” By her example, and with her plain talk, all-American good looks and boundless energy, she made science accessible and way cool.

Few schoolgirls had Sally’s academic brilliance or her athletic prowess. Far fewer had the bold drive that led her into space. “I never went into physics or the astronaut corps to become a role model. But after my first flight it became clear to me that I was one. And I began to understand the importance of that to people. Young girls need to see role models in whatever careers they may choose, just so they can picture themselves doing those jobs someday. You can’t be what you can’t see.” She co-wrote seven books for children and young adults on space subjects, and developed two outreach projects for NASA aimed at middle school students, all meant to inspire young people to study science and pursue STEM careers. On Sesame Street she sponsored the letter A (for astronaut). She also appeared with Muppets on Fraggle Rock.

With her partner Tam O’Shaughnessy, a childhood friend and fellow elite tennis hopeful turned science professor (psychology, in Tam’s case, at San Diego State), she founded Sally Ride Science, a company that produces engaging science programs for elementary and middle school students, especially girls. She liked to quote fellow astrophysicist Carl Sagan: “It is suicidal to create a society that depends on science and technology…in which no one knows anything about science and technology.” “If we want scientists and engineers in the future” she said, “we should be cultivating the girls as well as the boys.” There is no way to know how many women have entered, or are preparing to enter, STEM careers because of her influence on their attitudes about themselves and about science. Elementary schools in Texas and Maryland have been named after Sally Ride.

Near the start of 2011 she learned she had advanced pancreatic cancer. Ride died on July 23, 2012 at the age of 61. Her efforts left a better planet than the one she had seen from orbit decades before. “I would like to be remembered as someone who was not afraid to do what she wanted to do, and as someone who took risks along the way in order to achieve her goals.”

“High Flight“

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirthOf sun-split clouds, –and done a hundred thingsYou have not dreamed of –Wheeled and soared and swungHigh in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring thereI’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flungMy eager craft through footless halls of air…Up, up the long, delirious, burning blueI’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy graceWhere never lark or even eagle flew —And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trodThe high untrespassed sanctity of space,Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.